I don't know about figure skaters, but for girl gymnasts I have heard that it is the intense training itself that delays puberty (by generating a lot of testosterone), and gives you a certain body type and a high squeeky voice, etc.

I'm not sure what the physical effects might be of the kind of training that skaters undergo. Michelle Kwan, in interviews, has said that the only thing she doesn't like about her figure is her "skater's bubble butt." Also that she was leery at first of adding weights to her Pilates because she didn't want to "bulk up."

...the East German women swimmers DID take performance enhancing drugs. I do not blame the athletes for this, however, as they thought they were taking vitamin pills, etc. Still.....one has to wonder why they weren't stripped of their Olympic medals.

I'd read that it's because up until this year, they'd made a concious decision not to go back in time and remove medals from people due to drug tests done years after the medals were awarded. They would only strip medals from people if they didn't pass a drug test soon after the event. Of course, this seems to have changed with this whole BALCO thing, where they are re-testing old urine samples with new technologies that weren't available back when the events had actually happened. So who knows what will happen now.

As for the female gymnasts (or skaters) taking drugs to delay puberty. As others said, that is not necessary. The training alone, done at an intense level, will prevent menstruation and can prevent puberty. You'll often see female gymnasts, once they stop training at an elite level, suddenly seem to develop boobs and hips, their faces will look different, and even their voices will drop a bit lower. People talk about gymnasts - "oh, she must have gotten a boob job", when sometimes all that's happened is that she's finally, belatedly, hit puberty.

Ross Rebagliati was the Canadian snowboarder who tested positive for marijuana after winning the Gold in 1998. His team argued successfully that the minute amount that was found in his system was due to second hand smoke from all the pot smokers at Whistler. It was mentioned at the time that marijuana could possibly calm someone down before such an event, which was why I mentioned the beta blockers in a previous post.

Athletes often get screwed by mistakes made by so-called experts. Silken Laumenn was suffering from a dry cough before the 1995 Pan American games and was advised by her teammates to take Gravol on the train ride so she could sleep, which, although it's not banned, was bad advice. She talked to her doctor and he advised her to take Benadryl, presumably because it would help her sleep and was a wider acting antihistamine than Gravol (dramamine). Another bad piece of advice because a dry cough usually means you have thick mucus in the lungs and an antihistamine would dry it even more. The correct medicine would be an expectorant to loosen the phlegm. So, Silken went to the store to buy Benadry, and at that time, in Canada anyway, you had to ask for it over the counter. There was only one store I knew of that carried a variant of Benadryl with a decongestant - 60 mgs. of pseudoephredine ( a banned substance at the time) and they kept that on the shelf, while the plain Benadryl was behind the counter. So, she goes into a store, sees Benadryl on the shelf and buys it. She's a rower, not a pharmcist or a doctor, and shouldn't be expected to know what all the ingredients are in cold medicines. She was stripped of her medal and possibly lost money from sponsorships.
It was the same with Kyoko Ina - the USADA drug tester showed up at her house late at night when she was about to go to bed. She told them she couldn't produce a sample at that time, but would first thing in the morning. The tester, whose credentials had expired , and showed up with her boyfriend, had her sign an "Athlete Refusal Form" and they arranged for the test to be done the next morning, however the tester did not show up. You can read Ina's statement here:http://www.figureskatersonline.com/i...icles_003.html

IIRC, according to CBS, another argument the Canadian Olympic Committee used to reinstate Rebagliati's gold medal in Nagano was because, at the time, marijuana was not a listed banned substance in the snowboarding's governing body, or it wasn't as high-crime as a performance-enhancing drug.